Due to recent advances in technology, computer users are now able to enjoy many features that provide an improved user experience, such as playing various media and multimedia content on their personal or laptop computers. For example, most computers today are able to play compact discs (CDs) so users can listen to their favorite musical artists while working on their computers. Many computers are also equipped with digital versatile disc (DVD) drives enabling users to watch movies.
In some multimedia environments, a computer has access to a computer-readable medium storing compressed media files such as Moving Picture Experts Group audio layer-3 (MP3) files and WINDOWS MEDIA technologies audio (WMA) and video files. The computer typically organizes the media files into playlists when the compressed media files are played on the computer. The files may be organized according to metadata or other property data associated with the media content. Metadata for a digital media file such as an audio file includes general information pertaining to the media file itself. This information is typically stored within the file. For example, an audio file may have metadata tags for the song title, song artist, album title, and a rating. For example, in the case of audio media files, the files may be organized by album, artist, genre, date, or some user-specified selection and ordering. A user easily navigates through this organization using menus and graphical displays to render the desired media files.
However, some media files lack metadata or have metadata that is inconsistent or incomplete. The organization of such media files without sufficient metadata is limited. There is a need for obtaining relevant metadata for such media files. In some existing systems, a user requests updated metadata for the media files by sending, via a media player, the incomplete metadata to the existing system which has access to additional metadata. However, the existing systems often fail to identify the correct media content associated with the received metadata due to the incompleteness or other insufficiency of the received metadata. As such, existing systems often return no metadata or provide incorrect metadata to the user.
Accordingly, a system for matching input textual metadata to standardized metadata is desired to address one or more of these and other disadvantages.